Now, today, he had a perfect opportunity to show what they could do. It would take moments to launch the full battery, and that would surely send the redheads scurrying back into their hole. Yet the command to loose did not come. He looked back toward the commander, who sat on his horse calmly watching the Persians form up to attack and doing nothing else.
Ahmed Pasha, sometimes called Kucuk-Little-Ahmed, watched the Persians forming up before the gate. His men were eager to get at them and he hoped he could hold them back long enough. He had allowed musket fire at them-it would have been impossible to prevent and would have made the Persian wonder if his men had done nothing. The gunners had wanted to fire too-he had had to have one of his guards knock the match from the hand of one of the gun crew-for good measure he had had the cannon tipped forward and the ball drawn out. Now the gunners were racing to reload it.
The sultan had ordered him to fix the Persians’ attention here at Revan for at least a month. Today would decide if he could do it. He knew from captives that the Persians had more men and more guns than he had. But he also knew that he had stunned the Persian commander by the ferocity of his initial attack. Now, it looked like the Persian had gotten over his initial shock. If the Persian succeeded, even in a small way, today, Kucuk Ahmed knew he would lose. The Persian would swamp him using his huge garrison, and he would have to retreat too early.
Kucuk Ahmed was not a good loser. He planned to stun the Persian again. But to do that, he knew he had to hold his men back until the perfect moment. The moment when he could do the most damage to their confidence. Which was coming up…now.
Kemal saw the Pasha suddenly turn his head to where the signalmen waited. Then-at last-the flags moved, signaling the time had come. He turned and slashed his hand, and his men bent to light their fuses.
Mir Arash Khan looked down with satisfaction. His men had formed up. The Ottoman musketeers had caused a few casualties, but not nearly enough. It looked like the gun crew he’d been watching had finished loading their cannon, but that would not be enough to stop-or even slow-his attack. He heard an odd noise, like a piece of cloth tearing, and looked back toward the Ottoman trenches. They had fired one of their rockets. Those toys wouldn’t stop the attack either. He watched it as it headed toward his troops-some moved to avoid the place it looked like it would fall.
Kemal cursed. There was always one fuse that burned differently than the others. This one had been fast. But at least it hadn’t misfired. And there went the rest-first the five that had been left in the rack that launched the first, and over the next seconds the others. One hundred seventy-nine rockets followed their premature brother toward the ground he had so slowly been allowed to range. As soon as the last left its rack, he waved the men forward to begin reloading.
Arash looked up as the odd tearing sound was repeated and magnified. Suddenly the smoke trail left by the first rocket was obscured by what seemed to be hundreds more. His troops began to scatter.
Kemal spared a glance toward the Persians as the sounds of his rockets bursting reached his ears. It had been perfect. Not one rocket had veered off course, not one had stayed in the racks. Now let them joke about fireworks.
To Arash’s ears, the sounds of the explosions seemed quieter than he had expected, a bit muffled. A part of his mind concluded that each probably carried no more than two or three times the powder of a grenade. Under ordinary conditions, grenades were a danger the men could deal with. But so many grenades never came at once. The sound of the Ottoman cannon firing was a sharp punctuation to the rockets. Arash looked down. A cloud of smoke covered a long section of the center of his line. As he watched, a man emerged, staggering back toward the gate, seeming covered in blood.
“Hurry. Hurry.” Kemal knew his men were working as quickly as they could, but still he felt he had to drive them on. He took a moment to look at the Persians. His rockets had cut a hole in the center of their line, and the troops on the flanks were looking shaken. Men were falling back by ones and twos to the gate, some making a pretense of helping wounded comrades, some simply heading for safety. Fewer men were leaving the Persian left, though. A brightly clad officer was moving about, clearly steadying his men. That simplified Kemal’s next decision.
“Shift right two turns.” He repeated the instructions a half dozen times, with variations in the degree of shift, moving down the line as his men finished reloading. He heard a curse from Mustafa-his crank had jammed. Mustafa and his loader bent down and lifted the back of the rack, manually turning it.
“Tell the gunners to concentrate their fire on the part of the trenches the smoke trails came from,” Mir Arash Khan instructed the runners. The launchers were completely hidden behind earthen embankments, but having cannon balls bouncing near them should at least slow them down. Given how long the rockets seemed to need between shots, with any luck his men could be on them before a second volley could be launched.
He looked at his troops. The smoke had cleared. It wasn’t-quite-as bad as he feared. They were among his best troops, after all. There was even a small group in the center that seemed to have reformed and looked ready to step off. And the left flank, where Aryo commanded, looked as ready as though nothing had happened. He ordered the signal for the advance to be raised.
And then he heard the sound of cloth tearing again.
Kemal watched his rockets fly toward the Persian lines. This launch was less perfect. Two rockets had left their racks on trajectories that were completely random, and Mustafa had shifted his rack too far-all his rockets would miss. But it would be good enough, he thought.
A ripple of explosions covered the Persians in smoke. He started to turn back when a flicker of motion caught his eye. Impossibly, the brightly uniformed officer ran out of the enveloping smoke. He was followed closely by two of his men, then four more, then…then nothing. A ripple of musket fire kicked up the dirt around the men running toward the Ottoman lines. They did not slow. A burst from one of the volley guns cut them down. Behind them, the remaining Persians were crowding the gate.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and whipped around. It was one of Ahmed Pasha’s runners, his red cap slightly askew on his head.
“Ahmed Pasha commands you to put one more volley of your rockets on top of the walls.”
“I can put a dozen more volleys there.”
“Ahmed Pasha said to tell you one more, and only one more, if you said something like that. He also said to tell you that you have done what he needed, and done it well.”
Mir Arash Khan sat in his hall, occasionally touching a cloth to the cut on his head. It was small, but seemed not to want to stop oozing blood. He had returned to his residence after the gates had been closed. The Ottomans had not tried to storm them despite the confusion created by the third volley of rockets, and all his men who lived had been brought inside the walls.
After the disaster of the morning, the day had passed quietly. The Ottomans had dug more trenches, but there had been only desultory exchanges of fire.